Friday, June 24, 2011

The Kassel International Photobook Festival presented the best photobooks of the year, works that were nominated by 35 international experts from the photo scene around the globe. All nominated books were presented in a catalogue and exhibited during the festival.

The 2011 Festival Audience Vote for the best book of the International Photobook Award was given to Alec Soth's »Broken Manual«. Which I'm pleased to say was my nomination.

I said this about Broken Manual, Looking like something you might find in your father's workshop under a pile of old Popular Mechanics, Alec Soth's Broken Manual is ostensibly about escape and transformation. This many layered book deals with options and possibilities, chance and circumstance. What is going on here and why? This is a photobook for our times, where particularly right now in America so many things appear to be broken. But not Broken Manual. This photobook is about as close to perfect as you can get.

Here is a short list of other jury members and their nominated best books for 2011:

About Me

My pictures explore the strange anthropology of cities. The unusual and overlooked in the human landscape.
I am asking the viewer to question the idea that photographs as documents are complete representations of subject.
I'm interested in the universality of life and the idea of parallel lives - when one thing is happening here, something else is happening over there. The democracy of non-places fascinates me, in the knowledge that inevitably nothing is as it seems.
I work and live between Auckland and Paris.
http://harveybenge.com/
email:harvey.benge@xtra.co.nz